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This kind of supports my view of the UN being a place where countries can go to denounce each other and appease the masses without actually having to go to war.
by exelius 11y ago
This kind of supports my view of the UN being a place where countries can go to denounce each other and appease the masses without actually having to go to war.
The work they do is often irrelevant, but someone like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can go in front of some TV cameras at the UN general assembly in New York and denounce Israel. This lets him appear tough and influential in front of his power base, yet without much risk of starting an actual international conflict.
Without an outlet where countries can express such dissatisfaction, they would take to launching missiles at each other with greater frequency. The UN's existence is largely symbolic (organizations like NATO provide the real firepower), but symbolism and politics go hand in hand. So rather than lamenting the fact that the UN has no power and is a bureaucracy for its own sake, I would say that was the entire purpose. If you make people do a bunch of paperwork before they start fighting, chances are they will be satisfied with registering a complaint against each other.
- Apocryphon 11y ago"To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war." - Winston Churchill
- Semiapies 11y agoThere's always been jaw-jaw. Whether or not the UN providing a forum has actually lead to any less war-war doesn't seem obvious.
- madez 11y agoIt's always good when governments have ways to escalate international conflicts other than by shedding blood, even though, or especially if, these ways are consequenceless. Just to appease the hardliners.
- vanderZwan 11y agoSo it's kind of like the opposite of Sayre's Law? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law
- azernik 11y agoOne of the interesting things about reading histories of the outbreaks of the World Wars was how much international coordination was hampered by the lack of a regular, active forum where all the big international leaders went (the League of Nations was hampered from the beginning by the absence of the US). When everyone is doing everything by ad-hoc, one-on-one phone calls and negotiation sessions, things don't get done fast enough to react to crisis.
- danielweber 11y agoHow much of that was just communication difficulties?
- azernik 11y agoSome, but not all; a lot of the missteps in the lead-up to WWI, for example, were where two people had a conversation, agreed on something reasonable, then failed to communicate it to third parties who needed to be on board. When all of the great powers are in a room (as in the Security Council, which is I think the most necessary part of the UN) everyone gets all at once a feel for the positions of everyone else.
- AnimalMuppet 11y agoTrue, but... do you claim that in the UN, things do get done fast enough to react to a crisis?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- azernik 11y agoBetter? I think when the international community doesn't respond to crises, it's because there really is no consensus on what to do and different countries have different interests at stake, which can't really be fixed by better communication.
- Frondo 11y agoYeah, hah! You know what that tells me? The system works. People complaining instead of lobbing missiles? I wish everything could be solved with so little bloodshed!
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- mjklin 11y ago"Children, children! Do you want to be like the real UN or do you want to argue and waste time?" -- The Simpsons
- dnautics 11y agowell, one could imagine doing this at a much smaller cost, for example, the league of nations (which admittedly didn't work to prevent WWII), but did stop a lot of smaller wars.
- eternalban 11y ago> People complaining instead of lobbing missiles? Well, technically speaking, US, UK have shown that some of the member states get to "[lob] missiles" while others "complain". You are right. The "system" works .. for the Anglo-Saxon Imperial Axis.
- bradleyjg 11y agoThere are different facets to the UN. I agree that the General Assembly is mostly a talking shop, and to a lesser extent the Security Council is too (though occasionally it is a coordinating mechanism for the major world powers). Those are the two parts of the UN that most people think of when they hear UN, but there's a lot more to it. Things like the World Food Programme or the World Health Organization certainly have their issues, including those in the linked article, but they do some good work.